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Mesopotamian commentaries represent the world’s oldest cohesive group of hermeneutic texts. Numbering nearly 900, the earliest date to the eighth century and the latest to ca. 100 BCE. The purpose of this website is to make the corpus available both to the scholarly community and a more general audience by providing background information on the genre, a searchable catalog, as well as photos, drawings, annotated editions, and translations of individual commentary tablets. For the first time the cuneiform commentaries, currently scattered over 21 museums around the globe, will be accessible on one platform.

The Cuneiform Commentaries Project is funded by Yale University (2013-2016) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (Division of Research Programs “Scholarly Editions and Translations,” 2015-2018).

Recent additions to the corpus

CCP 3.5.59 - Ālu 59 [3] [3] [3] [3] [3] [3] [3] [3] [3] [3] [3] [3] [3] [3] [3] [3] [3] [3] [3] [3] [3] [3] [3] [3] © Yale Babylonian Collection NBC 7696, housed in the Yale Babylonian Collection, is a fairly well preserved one-column tablet, probably from Nippur, with a commentary on the 59th Tablet (called malsûtu) of the terrestrial omen series Šumma ālu.	CCP 3.5.31 - Ālu 31 ("29") [4] [4] [4] [4] [4] [4] [4] [4] [4] [4] [4] [4] [4] [4] [4] [4] [4] [4] [4] [4] [4] [4] [4] [4] Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum This small and badly broken tablet preserves the beginning and end of a commentary.	CCP 3.5.73 - Ālu 72-74 [5] [5] [5] [5] Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum This tablet, which was found in Ashurbanipal’s libraries in Nineveh, contains a commentary on three or more chapters of the divinatory series Šumma Ālu.	CCP 3.5.u3 - Ālu aḫû (43rd nisḫu) [6] [6] [6] [6] [6] [6] [6] [6] [6] [6] [6] © Vorderasiatisches Museum This tablet, found at the “house of the exorcists” in Assur, represents the only commentary on Šumma Ālu from that city. It explains omens related to bathing.
CCP 3.4.1.H - Bārûtu 1 Isru (?) H [7] [7] [7] [7] [7] [7] [7] [7] [7] [7] Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum This tablet contains meager remains of a text classified in the rubric as a mukallimtu-commentary. Only the citations from the base text are preserved, and not a single explanation (with the possible exception of r 5').	CCP 3.6.4.F - Šumma immeru (?) [8] [8] This small fragment contains meager remains of the lower right edge of a tablet. It probably belonged to the collection of tablets of Anu-ikṣur, from the sector Ue XVIII/1 in Uruk. Only seven lines of the obverse are preserved.	CCP 3.5.21 - Ālu 21 [9] [9] This small and badly damaged tablet preserves meager remains of a commentary on the 21st tablet of the divination series Šumma Ālu.	CCP 3.5.25 - Ālu 25 [10] [10] [10] This tablet contains a commentary on Šumma Ālu 25, one of the tablets of terrestrial omens that deals with snakes.

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